It started in August, going to LA's Chinatown with Zach Evans, buying sugar cane juice. The two of us had worked together on a short teaser for a horror project he is producing, and now we were talking about what project we wanted to do with all of our free time in the fall. So we wandered around Chinatown, a strange and addictive place. I had just gotten back from New York where I had worked as an assistant to my buddy Matt Tauber, who was directing his first feature film from his own script for a company called HDNet, a successor to OpenCity backed by Mark Cuban and making unique $1.5 million movies on HD back-to-back with a shooting schedule of about 20 days each. It was an intense and terrifying experience, and afterwards I was glad to be back home in LA (as strange as that sounds). I was reeling, trying to figure out where the hell I was as usual. I needed to find a house to live in, for one thing, and I needed to remember why the hell I got started on all of this to begin with.
Chinatown with Zach was a start. My girlfriend Lily saved me with the rest. First of all, she put up with me. I scribbled the script for this new movie on her kitchen table long hand, and stayed in her apartment for almost a month as I looked for a place of my own in Silverlake. She was doing incredible work on a new play and with the Groundlings, and because of that I accidentally met a few of the actors who would work in the movie. First, Jean Paul Rodriguez, from her acting class, and second, Royce Binion, a friend of a terrific actor named Simon Sorrells, a great guy and coincidentally one of Lily's best friends out here. Once I had these guys in mind, I started working on their stories.
But let me back up, because it's always a funny thing where a project comes from and what it's about. In some ways it's a total mystery. This one I called "Actors" because everyone in LA is an actor. It's a strange kind of movie, in three parts, about people who are out of their element and finding a way to move forward. And it's meant to be the exact opposite of the idea you get about LA from watching movies and television. These people define their environment, not the other way around. Jean Paul defined Hollywood, playing the game his own way. Royce was going to literally be cool in any situation, whether it was south LA by Watts where he lived, or Chinatown, where we shot his story. After living here for almost two years, I had a few stories I wanted to work on. Zach, Lily, Jean Paul, and Royce got me started.
This gave me an excuse to start talking to all the people out here who I was looking for a chance to work with. Gabe Reed, an incredible editor who went to the same highschool as I did in St. Louis. A DP named Chris Chambers that I'd heard about from Jared, my roommate from AFI. A composer in Atlanta named Russell Holbrook who I met at Sundance last year, whose stuff I thought would be perfect. Things started to fall into place.
Zach and Drew started looking for the actors I had written without anyone particular in mind, all of them hard types to pin down. The process began. We set up auditions and started scouting locations. Chris Chambers and I started hanging out at least once a week -- mainly over coffee, usually with a great deal of fruitful miscommunication. Actually, the first time we hung out it was to play tennis, and I let him win. We brought in a Production designer named Matt Hausman, who could do everything with practically nothing, and a sound guy named Zach Wrobel who was interested in working with some new equipment. And Josh Weiner, who had directed Lily in a fucking funny short called "Hy-phen," signed on as my AD. It was an incredible team.
Then we headed into the unknown. We shot for a week, hard to even remember it. We made it through. And I got this feeling in the middle, a hard sensation to forget:
Doing almost anything else, I have no idea what to do. But working on a project like this is a little like freefall, and it's like I've been wearing a parachute around to cocktail parties and laundromats. But once I was out of the plane, I knew just what to do.
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